We have begun to pollute and desecrate and cheapen all of our experiences. We are creating neat little life-boxes for everything, all tied up with a geo-tag, a photo, a check-in; our daily existence transformed into database entries in some NoSQL database on some spinning disk in some rack in suburban Virginia. - Ted Nyman

If your web application fails in browsers with scripting disabled, Jakob Nielsen’s dog will come to your house and shit on your carpet. - Mark Pilgrim

Complexity kills. Complexity sucks the life out of users, developers and IT. Complexity makes products difficult to plan, build, test and use. Complexity introduces security challenges. Complexity causes administrator frustration. - Ray Ozzie

That experience taught me a lot about what really matters in programming. It is not about solving puzzles and being the brightest kid in the class. It is about realizing that the complexity of software dwarfs even the most brilliant human; that cleverness cannot win. The only weapons we have are simplicity and convention. - Jonathan Edwards

I don't trust technology. Sure, it's great for sharing cat photos or defacing Wikipedia or porn, but every day there's some new innovation that delegates another human task to an unthinking machine. Unthinking - for now... - Stephen Colbert

I don't believe we can defeat no axis of evil
by putting smart bombs in the hands of dumb people. - Billy Bragg Waiting for the new world order

Excuse me, but just what was so hard to understand about this bunch? We knew they were dishonest. We knew they were fanatical. We knew they were purposely ignorant and bragged about not reading newspapers. We knew they were vindictive. We knew they were lawless. We knew they were obsessively secretive. We knew they had no time or patience for those who raised difficult questions. We knew they were driven by fantasies of religious warfare, personal vengeance and ideological triumph. We knew they had no respect for civil liberties. And we knew they took no responsibility for the consequences of their incompetence. Just what is surprising about the manner in which they've conducted the war? - Eric Alterman

IM is one more toxic spill that's directing our attention to short-term minor issues at the cost of procrastinating on important tasks that require more than a few minutes of uninterrupted thinking. Any time-management consultant will tell you that the basics of meeting your goals are to prioritize them and spend the most time on the most important problems. To make real progress in creative thinking, problem solving, or other knowledge work, we need to keep out interruptions and set our own agenda. IM, in contrast, lets your agenda be controlled by anybody who has your screen name. - Jakob Nielsen, article here

I would therefore like to posit that computing's central challenge, "How not to make a mess of it," has not been met. On the contrary, most of our systems are much more complicated than can be considered healthy, and are too messy and chaotic to be used in comfort and confidence. The average customer of the computing industry has been served so poorly that he expects his system to crash all the time, and we witness a massive worldwide distribution of bug-ridden software for which we should be deeply ashamed. - Edsger W. Dijkstra, Communications of the ACM, Mar 2001, Vol. 44, No. 3

The computer is both blessing and curse for it makes possible calculations once beyond the reach of human endurance while at the same time also making them virtually beyond the hope of human verification. - Henry Petroski, To Engineer Is Human (thanks to James Petroski (also with an "i" not a "y") for the correction)

La perfection est atteinte non quand il ne reste rien à ajouter, mais quand il ne reste rien à enlever. - Antoine-Marie-Roger de Saint-Exupery (Source)

I think of programming with beauty in mind, as being something elegant, something that you can be proud of for the way it fits together. - Donald Knuth

Having the capital cost of equipment drop to effectively zero allows you to think bigger. You start thinking about the whole thing. For instance, the gutsy maneuver of saying "let's index it all," which was the breakthrough of Altavista . Altavista in 1995 was an astonishing achievement, not because of the hardware -- yes, that was interesting and important from a technical perspective -- but because of the mindset. "Let's go index every document in the world." And once you have that sort of mindset, you can get really far. - Brewster Kahle

What people mean by the word 'technology' is the stuff that doesn't really work yet. - Danny Hillis

more managers ... means inefficiencies, higher costs and slower decision-making. - Carly Fiorina

I'd rather listen to Newton than to (Microsoft VP Craig Mundie). He may have been dead for almost three hundred years, but despite that he stinks up the room less. - Linus Torvalds

All the best people in life seem to like LINUX. - Steve Wozniak

(This one isn't cute but I don't have a page for inspirational quotations) "Don't flinch, don't foul, and hit the line hard." Teddy Roosevelt on how life is like football.